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Monthly Archives: March 2014

My creative non-fiction story, “Tuesday Night at the Triangle Bar”, was accepted by The Talking Stick. Publication is sometime this summer.

In the spirit of spring cleaning, this week I am going to sort and organize all the stories I’ve started and left hanging and the ones that are 95% done and just need a little brush up to send off to market. I will prioritize them, decide which have possibilities and which are dead ends for now.

This week’s work will give me a writing action plan for the rest of the month. Energized and eager to get started, I’m looking forward to digging into my archives. There’s gotta be gold somewhere in those messy files.

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The last time I published to this blog was in November. I truly meant to pick up where I left off and report about my evening, well seven minutes or so, reading my entry in the Edina Reads contest. When I didn’t get to it the next day, or the day after, and pretty soon it was a month later and it was Christmastime and then I took a trip to New York and New Hampshire, came back sick, malingered for a month or so. Now it’s March 16th.

About the reading at the Edina Senior Center . I did okay. Two runners-up read their stories and then it was time for me. I read my story, trying to remember to read at an understandable, i.e. slower, pace than the one I silently read at. A couple of times, I lost my place but no one knew what I meant to say, so I guess the whole thing went alright. They gave me a check. Best of all, my friends Joni and Cheri came out to support me. That made the evening for me.

On March 1, I slipped under the wire and submitted a story to The Talking Stick. I wrote the story last year and submitted it to a local, high profile magazine but never got a response from them. So I could have submitted far ahead of Talking Stick’s deadline. Yes, I could have. I must like the adrenaline rush of running out of time, though, because I waited and waited and waited. I can’t remember their scheduling, but I should hear from them in a month or so. I’ve had work published in their yearly anthology twice, in 2008 & 2009.

And, breaking news. My good friend Kay suggested that 2014 be my Year of No More Procrastination. This means breaking a long lifetime of the ‘p’ habit, but I’m ready to do it. It’s been so easy to let deadlines come and go, to not finish good stories, to not submit the ones that are complete, to not pursue self-publishing avenues, to not, to not, to not. So easy to drift and wonder and dream. Well, no more. The time will pass whether we pursue our dreams or not. Better to make use of the time we are given and at least try to catch a dream or two and make them reality.